SPACE Digital Arts team is based at SPACE Place, SPACE's training and resource centre in Hackney Wick, where we offer access to digital art and video editing facilities, project space and exhibition space.

The Digital Arts division of SPACE is currently expanding its ongoing commitment to providing affordable, innovative and socially responsive facilities and resources to the low-income, student and artist communities in the East End. We are advancing a number of projects engaging with these diverse constituencies, such as a conference exploring the potential of Flash as a medium displaced from the commercial realm, and a Hackney-based festival of the moving image that will feature screenings, panel discussions, installations and residencies in the surrounding community.

As a non-profit artist-led organisation with a longstanding history and visibility in the area, promoting an array of heterogeneous media art practices, SPACE is in a unique position to explore innovative technologies such as wireless networking. As such, we are currently implementing a wireless backbone between our two locations. The wireless infrastructure would be providing a trial platform for us both to expand and enhance the network capacity of SPACE as an organisation for all its users and to act as

a platform to instigate links between groups who are already involved in building wireless connectivity in the local community, other arts and community organisations who like ourselves are evaluating the potential of these and other OS technologies, local independent media and activist initiatives, and for fostering links within and between excluded or under-resourced groups in the local area (council estates, schools, locked psychiatric wards) as a means of self-organisation.

Further to our practical forays into wireless, we want to articulate a discursive framework that engages with the myriad issues at work in wireless considered as a social technology. To that end, SPACE Place Digital Arts, in conjunction with lateral.net and Informal, is in the process of organising an event that will encompass research projects, artists' commissions, workshops, and collaborative enquiry into the social implications and practical modalities of wireless networking technologies.

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